This is Sideline Stories. A platform where NE10 student-athletes can share their collegiate experiences in an unfiltered environment - using their voices to promote growth and positive change in our league and in all of NCAA Division II athletics.

Becca Shea, a senior on the Saint Anselm women's lacrosse team, talks about the abrupt end to her final season with the Hawks and what she will miss the most about her playing career. Here is her Sideline Story:

On our first day of online classes, my sociology of sport professor assigned an online discussion post: Ending a Sporting Career and Identity: Have you "retired" or transitioned from an athletic identity? Was it a positive or negative transition?

This was my post:

If we are being honest, I saw the topic of this week’s module and immediately started to cry, so to say sport is a fundamental part of my identity is an understatement.

I’ve known that the end of my career would eventually happen and I was grateful that it was able to extend four years into the collegiate level. However, the years I spent envisioning my final season as an upperclassman came to a grinding halt when the NCAA announced the suspension of all spring sports in response to the coronavirus.

This unprecedented act left me and my teammates to sort through a whole range of emotions with the only consolation being we had each other and an entire nation of athletes struggling with the same thing.

For every single spring student-athlete in America, our already-too-short four-season career was broken down to three. For me and other people in my class, that meant we did not know the last game of lacrosse that we played would be the last competition we participated in as a collegiate athlete.

This was announced before Saint Anselm sent its students home, so the first thing that ran through my mind was how I would be a part of this community without being a member of the women’s lacrosse team.

This may seem dramatic, but I had never known Saint Anselm without lacrosse; there were five weeks total of my time on the Hilltop (let’s say about 315 weeks) that I was not participating in formal and organized lifts, practices, films, games, and scrimmages. Those five weeks were masked by the chaos of finals.

I did not know how to work out if not for the goal of a better season. I did not know what I would do with my afternoons (and some mornings). Lacrosse was so woven into my everyday life that my routine shattered. That was not to mention my friends.

The 310 weeks that we spent together playing lacrosse led to countless hours outside of the sport; every practice led to a team dinner, most games led to a team party, and summers were filled with constant communication of when we could see each other next.

I’m sure you’ve heard that teams become family, but it is so much more than that. When you are running your eighth three-hundred-yard sprint on the turf, playing through an injury, waking up at 5 in the morning while the rest of campus sleeps, forfeiting nights out, doing homework on the bus- there is no one in the world that knows how you feel except the girls next to you.

You learn to play for one another and not for yourself. The end of lacrosse was more than losing a game I loved and my schedule, but it was losing that feeling of being a member of a team. I cannot begin to talk about the “what-ifs” of the season, how far we “could have” gone in the playoffs, or the memories I was not able to make.

I would argue this to be the harshest end to any athletic career. I would rather have suffered a career-ending injury and have been able to watch my team from the sidelines than for it to have been taken away from everybody.

Lacrosse is a part of my identity, as sports are to many people; however, we did not get a senior game, or even a senior season. I would literally give anything for one more game with my girls.

My retirement from sports was anything but easy, but I am grateful for the friends I made and lessons I learned. The most difficult part about the transition was surprisingly not the loss of the sport itself, but the loss of other aspects of my identity that had been interconnected through lacrosse like my routines, my expectations, my motivation and my best friends.

At Saint Anselm, I wore lacrosse-related apparel almost every day to class, walked into Dav post-practice with the team, and more, so it was not hard for others to connect me to the sport.

Next year, I will be going to law school. There, I will not be a student-athlete, not even an ex-athlete. I will have to forge an identity beyond that of a member of a team without the help of upperclassmen to pave my way and transition into the next part of life.

Lacrosse is deep-rooted in the person I have become so I know that it will help me with my future identities, as will the people I met in my athletic career, but I do wish I could be able to say I played four full seasons of college lacrosse alongside my team.

-Becca Shea